Seasons greetings! As Snoopy dons his Santa hat and Rudolph finds himself excluded from all those reindeer games yet again, the tube is still offering up a few spicy slices of sci fi for your holiday enjoyment…not least of which are those last looming Doctor Who eps featuring Mr. Tennant. Small screen sci fi news remains largely dormant this time of year, but we can still offer up a few giftwrapped tiny tidbits for fans.

Author Sawyer Flashes Forward With The Help Of A Calender (And Not A Physics Experiment Gone Wrong)
Sci Fi Wire highlights author Robert J. Sawyer’s defense of FlashForward’s eons-long preemption until March. Sawyer offers up handy comparative calendars to make his case – although this “Before” and “After” device doesn’t display the most drastic makeover result ever. (Not unlike the ‘geek girl gets a makeover’ movies in which the hottie heroine need only be relieved of her coke bottle eyeglasses in order to emerge a swan….) It wouldn’t have been that bad to endure a preemption once every couple of weeks as originally planned, would it?

Sawyer does entice us to read the original book in order to kill time between now and March. Which might not be the worst way to get your fill of spoilers.

Did ‘Alice’ Offer Up The Alternate “Pretty In Pink” Ending That We All Secretly Longed For?

IO9 gathers up an interesting assortment of viewer comments in reaction to Syfy’s Alice. Consensus seems to indicate that Andrew Lee Potts was the most watchable factor by a guyliner-decorated mile (amongst the ladies, anyway), and that the visuals were groovy enough. Even more noteworthy is the comparison made by commenter MissBethG, who observes that Alice opting for Hatter over the Prince was as if “Pretty in Pink ended differently, and Duckie gets the girl.”

Well said.

Missing Matriarch To Emerge On ‘Fringe’

Entertainment Weekly reveals that Irish actress Orla Brady has been cast as Peter’s mom and Walter’s other half (the one, you may recall, who was fond of telling a youthful Peter to “Be a better man than your father” during his nightly bedtime story, as the season opener revealed.)

Combined with this season’s earlier revelation that Walter had once enjoyed some LSD-fueled lab l’amour with Theresa Russell, Brady’s casting confirms Bishop’s status as not only our favorite resident loon, but that of babe magnet as well. Forget the damn ZFT manifesto – Walter needs to take pen to paper and jot down his ladykilling secrets.

Abrams Talks Twilight (The Zone, Not The Vampire-Inhabited Hottie Haven)

While a lot of the evidence supporting J.J. Abrams greatness does speak for itself, TV Guide provides a few additional new-ish insights in its recent interview with the intriguing auteur. Abrams talks TV (meta picture stuff), why he likes to create fiery female characters (er…no more than he likes to create fiery male characters, it turns out), and why Twilight Zone rocked his world when he was just a fledgling elementary school genius.

Tribble-Free Trek HILARITY

And finally, the funniest thing you will see all week: if you’d like to LOL without any clear sense as to why you’re doing so, enjoy this oddly hilarious clip highlighted at IO9, in which the Star Trek Next Gen actors are voiced over (perfectly, albeit nonsensically) by the comedy troupe Dayjob Orchestra.

“What do you say we make apple juice and fax it to each other?” Were the original STTNG even half as funny……